Minority business center opens in Boston

The Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council has opened a $1.4 million business center that will enable the council to go deeper in helping minority business owners launch and expand.

The new center, one of 30 across the country, is funded through a five-year grant from the U.S. Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency. Located in the development council’s headquarters on Huntington Avenue, at Copley Place, it will provide minority business owners with technical assistance, financing, access to contracts and help facilitating transactions between minority businesses and buyers.

“You need these businesses to be prepared to execute on the contracts,” said Ron Walker, president of Next Street Financial in Roxbury. Next Street is one of several organizations that will provide consulting and mentoring to the minority business owners seeking expertise from the new center.

The start of the business center comes at a critical time, two months after the Greater New England Minority Supplier Development Council merged with the Initiative for a New Economy, an organization that worked with minority business owners in much the same way as the new business center, but on a smaller scale.

In addition to Next Street Financial, the business center’s strategic partners include several Massachusetts state agencies, United Technologies, Turner Construction and EastWest Bank, said Warren Bacon, project director for the new business center and previously the chief operating officer for the Initiative for a New Economy.

Bacon said the center’s targets include creating an average of $100 million in new contracts awarded to minority businesses per year, with $85 million in new contracts awarded by next August and $121 million in new contracts the following year.

The center, which will employ four people, also aims to provide about $70 million in various types of financing, Bacon said, and expand the network of buyers interested in doing business with minority-owned businesses.

“Anybody who wants to buy, we want to talk to,” he said.

The new center builds on the merger between the Initiative for a New Economy and the Minority Business Development Council, Bacon said, a move originated by the Initiative’s board of directors to expand the organization’s work. The Initiative produced $40 million a year in new business and created 40 to 50 jobs, Bacon said.

“If you look at African-American businesses, they have a higher failure rate than any other. But if they succeed, they’re a bigger hiring force,” Bacon said. “You need to include this segment in the economy to make it work as well as it should.”